The sluggish mass must be indulg'd, till, wak'd'
By the ethereal spirit, it shall mount
From its dark cell, and court the upper air;
For, bak'd too soon, the cake, compact and hard,
To the dissolving butter entrance free
Denies, while disappointment and disgust
Prey on the heart. Much less do thou neglect
The auspicious moment! Thee, nor business then
Must urgent claim, nor love the while engross:
For, ever to the skies aspiring still,

The fluid vivified anon ascends,

Disdains all bound, and o'er the vase's side
Flows awful! till, too late admonish'd, thou
The miserable waste shalt frantic see,
And, in the acid draff within, perceive
Thy hopes all frustrate. Thus Vesuvius in
Some angry hour, 'mid flames and blackening smoke,
From his infuriate crater pours profuse
The fiery lava-deluging the plains,

And burying in its course cities, and towns,
And fairest works of art! But, to avert
Catastrophe so dire, the griddle smooth,—
Like steely buckler of the heroic age,
Elliptical, or round-and for not less
Illustrious use design'd-make ready quick.
Rubb'd o'er the surface hot, a little sand
Will not be useless; this each particle
Adhesive of the previous batch removes,
And renders easy the important work,
To gracefully reverse the half-bak'd cake.
With like intent, the porker's salted rind,
Mov'd to and fro, must lubricate the whole:
And this perform'd, let the white batter stream
Upon the disk opaque, 'till silver'd o'er
Like Cynthia's, it enchants the thoughtful soul.
Impatient of restraint, the liquid spreads,
And, as it spreads, a thousand globules rise,
Glistening, but like the bubble joy, soon burst,
And disappear. Ah, seize the occasion fair,
Nor hesitate too long the cake to turn;
Which, of a truth, unsightly else must look,
And to the experienc'd, nicer palate, prove
Distasteful. See! 'tis done: and now, O now
The precious treat! spongy, and soft, and brown;
Exhaling, as it comes, a vapor bland:

While, all emboss'd with flowers, (to be dissolv'd,
Anon, as with the breath of the warm South,)
Upon the alluring board the butter gleams-
Not rancid, fit for appetite alone

Of coarsest gust, but delicate and pure,
And golden like the morn.

Yet one thing more ;—
The liquid amber which, untir'd, the bee
From many a bloom distils for thankless man;
For man, who, when her services are o'er,
The little glad purveyor of his board
Remorseless kills. But to the glorious feast!
Ye Gods! from your Olympian heights descend,
And share with me what ye, yourselves, shall own
Far dearer than ambrosia. That, indeed,
May haply give a zest to social mirth,
And, with the alternate cup, exhilarate
The sons of heaven: but my nepenthe rare,
Not only cheers the heart, but from the breast
Care, grief, and every nameless ill dispels-
Yielding a foretaste of immortal joy!

HENRY J. FINN.

HENRY J. FINN was born in the city of New York, in the year 1782. When a boy he sailed for England, on the invitation of a rich uncle resident there. The vessel sank at sea, and the passengers and crew were for many days exposed in small boats until they were picked up by a ship which landed them at Falmouth. Finn resided

in London until the death of his uncle, who made no mention of him in his will. He then returned to New York in 1799, studied law for two years, -became tired of the profession, returned to London, and made his first appearance at the Haymarket Theatre "in the little part of Thomas in the Sleep Walker." He continued on the stage with success, and in 1811 returning to America made his first appearance at Montreal. He next performed in New York, and afterwards became a member of the stock company of the Federal Street Theatre, Boston. Here he remained for several years, and was at one time manager of the theatre. He was extremely successful here, and in every part of the country which he subsequently visited, as a comic actor, and accumulating a handsome fortune, retired in the intervals of his engagements to an elegant residence at Newport. He was on his way to his pleasant home, when with many others he met a sudden and awful death, in the conflagration of the steamboat Lexington on the night of January 13, 1840.

Finn was celebrated as a comic writer as well as a comic actor. He published a Comic Annual, and a number of articles in various periodicals. The bills of his benefit nights were, says Mr. Sargent, "usually made up of the most extraordinary and inconceivable puns, for which his own name furnished prolific materials."* He wrote occasional pathetic pieces, which possess much feeling and beauty, and left behind him a MS. tragedy, portions of which were published in the New York Mirror, to which he was a contributor in 1839. He also wrote a patriotic drama entitled Montgomery, or the Falls of Montmorenci, which was acted at Boston with success and published. He was a frequent versifier, and turned off a song with great readiness. He also possessed some ability as a miniature and landscape painter. Of his ingenious capacity in the art of punning, a paragraph from a sketch of May Day in New York in his "Comic Annual," may be taken as a specimen.

Then hogs have their essoine, the cart-horse is thrown upon the cart, and clothes-horses are broken upon the wheel. Old jugs, like old jokes, are cracked at their owners' expense, sofas lose their castors, and castors forsake their cruets, tumblers turn summersets, plates are dished; bellows, like bankrupts, can raise the wind no more, dog-irons go to pot, and pots go to the dogs; spiders are on the fly, the safe is not safe, the deuce is played with the tray, straw beds are down. It is the spring with cherry trees, but the fall with cherry tables, for they lose their leaves, and candlesticks their branches. The whole family of the brushes-hearth, hair, hat, clothes, flesh, tooth, nail, crumb, and blacking, are brushing off. Books, like ships, are outward bound; Scott's novels become low works, Old Mortality is in the dust, and Kenilworth is worthless in the kennel. Presidential pamphlets are paving the way for new candidates, medical tracts become treatises on the stone, naval tacticians descend to witness the novelty of American flags having been put down, and the advocates of liberality in thought, word, and deed, are gaining ground. Then wooden ware is every where. Pails are without the pale of preservation,

and the tale of a tub, at which the washerwoman wrings her hands, in broken accents tells

Of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,
That wind up the travel's history

of a New York comic annual celebration.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

DANIEL WEBSTER was born in the town of Salisbury, New Hampshire, Jan. 18, 1782. His father, a farmer, and according to the habit of the country and times an inn-keeper, a man of sterling character and intelligence, Major Ebenezer Webster, was a pioneer settler in the region on one of the townships established after the conclusion of the old French War, in which he had served under Amherst at Ticonderoga. He was subsequently a soldier of the Revolution, with Stark at Bennington, and saw the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga. He closed his life in the honorable relation of Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in 1806, at the age of sixty-seven. His son, in one of his Franklin letters, describes him as "the handsomest man I ever saw, except my brother Ezekiel," and adds, "he had in him what I recollect to have been the character of some of the old Puritans. He was deeply religious, but not sour-on the contrary, good-humored, facetious-showing even in his age, with a contagious laugh, teeth, all as white as alabaster-gentle, soft, playful-and yet having a heart in him that he seemed to have borrowed from a lion." ster's first speech at the bar was while his father was on the bench; he never heard him again.

Web

The future orator received his first education from his mother. In 1796 he was for a few months at Phillips (Exeter) Academy, under the charge of Dr. Benjamin Abbott, making his preparations for college, which he completed under the Rev. Dr. Samuel Wood, of Boscawen, one of the trustees who facilitated his admission. He entered Dartmouth in 1797, and having overcome by his diligence the disadvantages of his hasty preparation, took his degree, with good

It was in reference to this early habitation that Daniel Webster, in a speech at Saratoga in 1840, paid an elegant tribute to the memory of his father. He described the log-cabin in which his elder brothers and sisters were born, "raised amid the snow-drifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early, that when the smoke first rose from its rude chimney, and curled over the frozen hills, there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. Its remains still exist. I make to it an annual visit. I carry my children to it, to teach them the hardships endured by the generations which have gone before them. I weep to think that none of those who inhabited it are now among the living, and if ever I am ashamed of it, or if I ever fail in affectionate veneration for him who raised it and defended it against savage violence and destruction, cherished all the domestic virtues beneath its roof, and through the fire and blood of a seven years' revolutionary war, shrunk from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice to serve his country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his own, may my name and the name of my posterity, be blotted for ever from the memory of mankind."

+ Letter of Webster, Franklin, May 8, 1846. Memorials (Appleton), ii. 243.

This school was founded in 1778 by John Phillips, a graduate of Harvard, son of a pious minister of Andover, in conjunction with his bro her, Samuel Phillips, of Andover. In 1789 John Phillips gave a further sum of $20,000, and bequeathed two thirds of his estate to the same object. He died in 1795. Dr. Abbott was the principal of this academy for fifty years, from 1789. At the close of that period he retired from his position, on which occasion a festival of the pupils was held, and speeches were made by Webster, Everett, and others. Among his pupils, of the public men of the country, had been Cass, Woodbury, the Everetts, Sparks, Bancroft.

reputation as a scholar, Aug. 26, 1801. In consequence of a difficulty with the Faculty respecting the appointments, he did not speak at the Commencement. There was a sharp feeling of competition growing out of the rival literary societies, which led him to resent the assignment of the chief post, the Latin Salutatory, to another; while the Faculty thought his fine talents in English composition might be better displayed in an oration on the fine arts or a poem.* He delivered a discourse the day previously, before the College Societies, on The Influence of Opinion. Subsequently, in 1806, he pronounced the Phi Beta Kappa College oration, on The Patronage of Literature.

While in College, in his nineteenth year, in 1800, he delivered a Fourth of July oration at the request of the citizens of Hanover, which was printed at the time. It is patriotic of course, and energetic, well stored with historical material, for Webster was not, even in a Fourth of July oration in youth, a sounder of empty words. A funeral oration, which he pronounced a short time before leaving college, on the death of Ephraim Simonds, a member of the Senior Class, has that dignity of enumeration which is noticeable in Webster's later orations of this description. "All of him that was mortal," he spoke, 66 now lies in the charnel of yonder cemetery. By the grass that nods over the mounds of Sumner, Merrill, and Cooke, now rests a fourth son of Dartmouth, constituting another monument of man's mortality. The sun, as it sinks to the ocean, plays its departing beams on his tomb, but they reanimate him not. The cold sod presses on his bosom; his hands hang down in weakness. The bird of the evening chants a melancholy air on the poplar, but her voice is stillness to his ears. While his pencil was drawing scenes of future felicity, while his soul fluttered on the gay breezes of hope,—in unseen hand drew the curtain, and shut him from our view."†.

Upon leaving college, Webster began the study of the law with Thomas W. Thompson, a lawyer of distinction, who was subsequently sent to the United States Senate, and presently left, to take charge, for a year, of the town academy at Fryeburg, in Maine, with a salary of three hundred and fifty dollars, which he was enabled to save by securing the post of Assistant to the Register of Deeds to the county, and with which he managed to provide something to support him in his legal studies, and for his brother Ezekiel's education. In 1802 he returned to the office of Thompson at Salisbury, and two years afterwards went to Boston, where he completed his legal studies with the Hon. Christopher Gore. He was admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1805. To be near his father he opened an office for the practice of his profession at Boscawen, N. H. After his father's death he removed to Portsmouth in his native state, where he maintained himself till 1816. In 1808 he had married the daughter of the Rev. Mr. Fletcher, of Hopkinton, N. H.‡

* Prof. Sanborn, of Dartmouth. Eulogy on Webster before the Students of Phillips Academy, Andover. + Lyman's Memorials of Webster, i. 246.

This lady died in 1827, leaving four children-Grace, who died early; Fletcher, who survives his father; Julia, married to Mr. Appleton, of Boston, and since dead; and Edward, who

In 1812 he delivered a Fourth of July oration at Portsmouth, before the Washington Benevolent Society, on the Principal Maxims of Washington's Administration.

In 1813 he was elected to the House of Representatives, and made his maiden speech on the Berlin and Milan decrees. In 1814 he was reelected. In New Hampshire his legal course was sustained by association with Dexter, Story, Smith, and Mason. In Congress, he at once took his place with the solid and eloquent men of the House. In 1816 he removed to Boston, pursuing his profession with the highest distinction. In 1823 he again took his seat in the House of Representatives, and made his speech on the Greek Revolution, 19th Jan., 1824, a speech which added greatly to his reputation. He was reelected-out of five thousand votes only ten being cast against him, and a similar event took place in 1826. The more prominent general addresses date from this period.

In December, 1820, while a member of the Convention to revise the Constitution of Massachusetts, he delivered his Plymouth_oration on The First Settlement of New England.

The first Bunker Hill speech was delivered June 17, 1825, when the corner-stone of the monument was laid; the second exactly eighteen years afterwards on its completion. His Discourse in Commemoration of Jefferson and Adams was pronounced at Faneuil Hall, August 2, 1826.

In 1827 he was elected to the Senate, where he continued for twelve years, during the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren. His brother, Ezekiel Webster, fell in court at Concord while pleading a cause, and died instantaneously, of disease of the heart, in 1829. In 1830, his celebrated oratorical passage with Col. Robert Y. Hayne, of South Carolina,* occurred, in reply to an attack upon New England, and an assertion of the nullification doctrines. The scene has been described both by pen and pencil, the artist Healy having made it the subject of a large historical picture. The contest embodied the antagonism for the time between the North and the South. Hayne, rich in elocution and energetic in bearing, was met by the cool argument and clear statement of Webster rising to his grand peroration, which still furnishes a national watchword of Union. It was observed, on this occasion, that Webster wore the colors of the Whig party of the Revolution, a blue coat and buff

fell a Major in the Mexican war. In 1880 Webster married a Becond time, Caroline, daughter of Herman Le Roy, of New York, by whom he had no children.

Robert Y. Hayne was born in the parish of St. Paul, South Carolina. Nov. 10, 1791. His grandfather was a brother of the Revolutionary martyr, Col. Isaac Hayne. He was a law pupil of Langdon Cheves, and rose rapidly at the bar in Charleston. He began his political career in the state legislature in his twenty-third year, was soon Speaker of the House, and Attorney-General of the State. He took his seat in the United States Senate, in his thirty-first year, as soon as he was eligible for the office. He resigned his seat ir. 1882, to take the post of Governor of the State in the nullification days, when he issued a counter proclamation in reply to that of President Jackson. When the matter was adjusted he turned his attention to state improvement, in the midst of which he was taken with a mortal illness, and died in his forty-eighth year, Sept., 1889. Besides his speeches in the Senate, characterized by their ability and eloquence, he was the author of the papers in the old Southern Review on improvement of the navy, and the vindication of the memory of his relative, Col. Hayne.Life, Character, and Speeches, of the late Robert Y. Hayne. -Oct., 1845,

Dome Webster

Many of the speeches of Webster of this period were in opposition to the financial policy of the government. In the spring and summer of 1839 he visited England and France, and was received with the greatest distinction in both countries; where his reputation, personal and political, as a man and an orator was well established. He spoke on several public occasions, but the only instance in which his remarks have been preserved at length was his speech on his favorite topic of agriculture at the Triennial Celebration of the Royal Society of Agriculture at Oxford.* On his return he engaged in the presidential contest which resulted in the election of General Harrison, under whose administration he became Secretary of State in 1841. To complete the adjustment of the boundary question and other outstanding difficulties with England, he retained office under Tyler till 1843. In 1845, in the Presidency of Polk, he returned to his seat in the Senate, where he continued till he was called by Fillmore to the department of State again in 1850. He had previously sustained the Compromise Measures with the full weight of his ability, both in Congress and in numerous "Union" speeches throughout the country. He should have had the Whig nomination to the Presidency, but the availability of Scott interposed. The frequent engagements of Webster at Conventions and gatherings through the States, endeared him much in his latter days to the people. He spoke at the opening of the Erie Railroad in 1851; he delivered a discourse on his favorite books and studies before the New York Historical Society, in February, 1852; and in the same month presided at the Metropolitan Hall assembly, when Bryant read his eulogy on

⚫ July 18, 1889.

the novelist Cooper. In May he made his last great speech in Faneuil Hall to the men of Boston.

It was in office, the active service of the public, with scant intervals for recreation, and but a few months' travel away from his native land, that he had passed his life, and in the harness of office, as Secretary of State, he died. Since the deaths of Washington and Hamilton, no similar event had so deeply moved the country. The national heart throbbed with the pulsations of the telegraph which carried the news of his last moments through the land. Calmly, courageously, in the full exercise of his faculties, he discharged his last duties for his country, and watching the falling sands of life, discoursed with his friends of religion and immortality. The first intimation which the public received of his serious illness, was most touchingly conveyed in a newspaper article which appeared in the Boston Courier of the date of October 20, entitled, " Mr. Webster at Marshfield." Its author, who is understood to have been Professor C. C. Felton of Harvard College, after reviewing his recent political course, described the noble natural features of his farm, as a framework for a notice of its owner, to whom the writer passed by a masterly transition. "As you look down from these hills, your heart beats with the unspeakable emotion that such objects inspire; but the charm is heightened by the reflection that the capabilities of nature have been unfolded by the skill and taste of one whose fame fills the world; that an illustrious existence has here blended its activity with the processes of the genial earth, and breathed its power into the breath of heaven, and drawn its inspiration from the air, the sea, and the sky, and around and above; and that here, at this moment, the same illustrious existence is, for a time, struggling in doubtful contest with a foe to whom all men must, sooner or later, lay down their arms. Solemn thoughts exclude from his mind the inferior topics of the fleeting hour; and the great and awful themes of the future now seemingly opening before him-themes to which his mind has always and instinctively turned its profoundest meditations, now fill the hours won from the weary lassitude of illness, or from the public duties which sickness and retirement cannot make him forget or neglect. The eloquent speculations of Cicero on the immortality of the soul, and the admirable arguments against the Epicurean philosophy put into the mouth of one of the colloquists in the book of the Nature of the Gods, share his thoughts with the sure testimony of the Word of God." Two days after, the telegraph bore this brief announcement from Boston--" A special messenger from Marshfield arrived here this morning, with the melancholy intelligence that Daniel Webster cannot live through the day." From that moment, almost hourly, news was borne through the country to the end, between two and three o'clock on the morning of Sunday, October 24, 1852.

* *

Among the last words which Webster listened to, and in which he expressed an interest, were some stanzas of Gray's Elegy, which he had endeavored to recall, and the sublime consolation of the Psalmist, repeated by his physician, Dr. Jeffries: "Though I walk through the valley of the

shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." The last words he uttered were, "I still live."*

Then it was felt how great a heart the mask of life had covered. Death, in the grand language of Bacon, had "opened the gate to good fame, and extinguished envy." Traits of the nobility of the man were called to mind. It was remembered how he had dwelt upon the simple universal ideas of the elements, the sea rolling before him at Marshfield; the starry heavens shining through the foliage of the elm at his door; the purpling of the dawn;t his admiration of the psalms and the prophets, and the primeval book of Job; his dying kindness to his friend Harvey, and the friendly intercourse which he had sustained with the country people around, whose · love for their rural occupations he had exalted; and how in his last days, when too feeble to leave his room, he had refreshed his mind with those favorite pursuits, by looking at the cattle, which he had caused to be driven to the window.

Funeral honors were paid to his memory in the chief cities of the Union by processions and orations. His interment took place at Marshfield on Friday the 29th October. His remains, dressed as when living, were conveyed from the library to a bier in front of the house, beneath his favorite elm. The funeral services were performed by the pastor of the neighboring church at South Marshfield, when the numerous procession, including delegates from various public bodies of several States, followed to the tomb, built for its new occupant, for his family and himself, on an elevation commanding a view of the country around, and of the sea. Here he rests. A marble block, since placed in front of the tomb, bears the legend: "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief."

It may be recalled that the poet Dwight, in his last hours, was consoled by the same text of Scripture; and that a similar expression was among the last which fell from the lips of Priestley.

An authentic account of Webster's illness and death was prepared by Mr. George Ticknor, and is published in the elegantly printed volume "A Memorial of Daniel Webster, from the city of Boston," published in 1853, which contains the obituary proceedings and orations of the courts and various societies, as well as Professor Felton's notice of the last autumn at Marshfield."

+ He took refuge in these remote starry suggestions, placing the temporizing politics of the hour at an infinite distance from him, when he was called up one night at Washington, by a crowd of citizens, to receive the news of Scott's nomination for the Presidency.-" Gentlemen: this is a serene and beautiful night. Ten thousand thousand of the lights of heaven illuminate the firmament. They rule the night. A few hours hence their glory will be extinguished.

You meaner beauties of the night,
Which poorly satisfy our eyes,

What are you when the sun doth rise?

Gentlemen: There is not one among you who will sleep better to-night than I shall. If I wake I shall learn the hour from the constellations, and I shall rise in the morning, God willing, with the lark; and though the lark is a better songster than I am, yet he will not leave the dew and the daisies, and spring upward to greet the purpling east, with a more blithe and jocund spirit than I shall possess."

The day before he died he called for his friend Peter Harvey, a merchant of Boston, whom he requested not to leave him till he was dead. He had shortly before written an order -"My son, take some piece of silver, let it be handsome, and put a suitable inscription on it, and give it, with my love, to Peter Harvey. Marshfield, Oct. 23, 1852."

§ With regard to Webster's religious views, he had probably no strongly defined system of observance. Early in life, it is said, he was a member of the Presbyterian church, latterly he was in communion with the Episcopal church.-Letter of the Hon. R. Barnwell Rhett, Charleston Mercury. Nov. 1852.